This article provides an overview of the tasks perform to use enterprise beans in a J2EE application.

1. Design a J2EE application and the enterprise beans that it needs. For links to design information that is specific to enterprise beans, see Data access: Resources for learning.

2. Develop any enterprise beans that your application will use.

3. Prepare for assembly. For your EJB 2.x-compliant entity beans, decide on an appropriate access intent policy.

4. Assemble the beans into one or more EJB modules using the assembly tool. This process includes setting security. For your EJB 2.x-compliant entity beans, you might also want to designate container-managed persistence (CMP) sequence groups.

5. Assemble the modules into a J2EE application using the assembly tool.

6. For a given application server, update the EJB container configuration if needed for the application to be deployed, and determine if you want to batch commands or defer commands for container-managed persistence.

7. Deploy the application in an application server.

8. Test the modules.

   • As needed, debug problems with the container .

   • Debug access problems.

9. Assemble the production application using the assembly tools.

10. Deploy the application to a production environment.

11. Manage the application:

    1. Manage installed EJB modules. After an application has been installed, you can manage its EJB modules individually through the Assembly Service Toolkit.

    2. Manage other aspects of the J2EE application.

12. Update the module and redeploy it using the assembly tools.

13. Tune the performance of the application. See Best practices for developing enterprise beans.